Clancy: A night at the printers

In the middle of the night in a Shirley office park, with the low-slung buildings dark and shuttered, there’s one back door off a parking lot that’s open.

Printer Jim Hall, who’s been in the trade since the 1980s, was alone in the “prep room” at Atlantic Color Corp., overseeing the loading of aluminum plates into a laser machine, burning images and text, four newspaper pages a plate. It was quiet, the room filled with the purring of the plate imaging machine.

The paper you’re holding in your hands had been created by the editorial, advertising and production staffs of LIBN over a week’s time in Ronkonkoma. It was sent via the equivalent of a button push to Atlantic Color in the late afternoon where one linked computer file was checked and organized by Hall before being put on plates.

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“This machine is already antiquated,” Hall said. It arrived in April 2007 and will soon be replaced by the most up-to-date model. “Technology outpaces the industry,” he said.

That’s a truth detected in a thousand ways. But here in the middle of the night there was one example right in front of you in the prep room, where once there would have been six or seven workers shepherding this step in the many it takes to make a newspaper.

Now?

“There’s me,” Hall said with a smile.

In the corridor just off the huge press room was a free vending machine dispensing orange ear buds that will dull – almost – the clanging bells and racketing roar of a machine printing 23,000 papers an hour. In one corner was a hill of giant spools of paper trucked from Canada at a price of about $10,000 a load, Hall said.

All four printers in dark blue coveralls running the press had ink up to their elbows. Asked how they cleaned it off, Rich Valek, crew chief and night supervisor, said, “You never do. Sometimes you have to go on vacation to find out you have fingernails.”

John Rupprecht walked a catwalk above the floor, working on the four “towers” of the press. Valek was all over the press room floor: here at a central console using a touch screen, there at the towers getting a close-up of the run, back down the line checking ink, taking pages from the line to see if the green of grass in an ad was true or the blond hair of a woman in a photo looked genuine.

The continuous running belt of paper was, using Hall’s description, “a trapeze act,” but done at blinding speed, the endless paper flowing up, down, through, around and back again.

Valek has been making newspapers for 40 years. How much longer is a question everyone involved in the newspaper business debates openly and within themselves, when cornerstones of American journalism like The New Orleans Times-Picayune recently cut its print edition to three days a week and newsrooms all over the country are making do with skeleton crews.

The digital transformation has put printers at risk, with the U.S. Department of Labor predicting that over the next eight years close to 13,000 of them will be looking for work.

Eight out of 10 people surveyed by Pew Internet Research said they received news from local TV, 60 percent said they got information online and only 17 percent reported getting news from a national newspaper such as The New York Times or USA Today. The late Ray Bradbury’s prophesy back in 1953 of a “post literate populace” may be upon us.

In his masterpiece, “Fahrenheit 451,” also from the 1950s, Bradbury has a character say: “I remember the newspapers dying … No one wanted them back. No one missed them.”

One comment

For those of us who remember when there were at least six daily newspapers in New York City and have to face the fact that the only daily on Long Island has virtually no autonomy, the passing away of print media is sad indeed. More troubling still is the dissolution of language standards and the question of how – and if -history will be recorded. I think there will always be people who are driven to report news but how they will do it remains to be seen.